See How People REALLY Spend Their Money With New Mint Data

Nick Saint

Oct. 28, 2010, 12:01 PM

Personal finance site Mint.com just announced the launch of Mint Data, which offers publicly available, real-time data on how the spending patterns of Mint users.

Mint Data lets you see charts showing how popular particular businesses are, and how much customers spend their on average, compared to other businesses in the same category in the same market. You can also compare how users' spending breaks down by category at the aggregate level.

For consumers, this offers a new, and perhaps better, way to compare, say, restaurants by price. Sites like Yelp, Seamless Web, and Zagat's all attempt to give estimates of what a meal at a particular spot will cost you based on menu prices, but with Mint Data, you can see how much actual people eating at that restaurant recently have spent on average.

This could also be of use to people with a more general, theoretical interest in spending patterns. As Mint's press release puts it, its data offers "an unprecedented real-time economic index." Obviously, the data is skewed by the demographics of Mint's user base, and we'd like to see more advanced options for searching and creating charts, but this is potentially a great new resource.